Ventura nodded. They were two thousand feet up and easing in for the landing. He looked at his watch. Though it wasn’t that far, the hop to the private airfield via chopper had taken forty-five minutes; part of that was for a couple of changes of direction, just in case. And it was farther away from Smith’s compound than the commercial airport at Coeur d’Alene. Ventura had arranged for the helicopter before they’d arrived, knowing they’d need it once the game was fully engaged. Inside the militia’s base, they’d be safe, but once they left, the odds shifted. Even Morrison understood this, once it had been pointed out to him.

“But why a helicopter?” he’d asked.

“Because they know you’re leaving. They also know where you are going—unless you can conduct your test by remote control, you have to go back to Alaska to play the tune on your HAARP. I’ve got people in place there, and anybody who shows up for hunting or birdwatching is going to be considered armed and dangerous. But if I were the Chinese and interested in grabbing you, I’d give it a try here, first. There is only one road leading to this place, and a couple of half-wits in camo with binoculars can cover it. Half my people will convoy out in two of the rental cars an hour before the copter arrives, heading for the airport at Coeur d’Alene. That’ll give them something to look at if they are out there. They’ll probably expect some kind of subterfuge, so the third car will leave fifteen minutes after the first two, going the other way. Probably this will draw any fire teams that might have been set up. Forty-five minutes later, we take off. They won’t be able to follow us in the air without us seeing them, and I don’t think they’ll expect that anyhow. Even if they manage to footprint us with one of their spysats, we won’t stay in range long, so they’ll lose us while we’re still heading the wrong way. If they have that much going for them, they’ll probably figure out we’re going to a private airfield, but by the time they can figure out which strip and get people there, we’ll be gone. We have a chartered plane waiting for us when the copter touches down.”

“What if they’ve anticipated this and already have people at the private airfield?”

Ventura grinned. The man was beginning to catch on. “If they’re that smart, then I’ll just have to shoot them.”

He digested that for a moment. “This must be costing a fortune.”

“Not even a drop in your bucket, if you pull it off. Besides, I haven’t even run out of your retainer yet.”

Morrison hadn’t spoken to that, but Ventura could see the man was scared. Well he should be, dealing with these kinds of players. But at this level of the game, if Morrison got deleted, it was likely that Ventura would be crossing that bridge with him, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. He only had to keep the Chinese hopping long enough for the deal to get done. Once the money was transferred and the information was in hand, Morrison would have to disappear, go into hiding permanently, though he didn’t know that yet. With enough money, you could vanish completely and live out your life in comfort and security, provided you knew how. Ventura knew the drill and he would advise Morrison, but that wasn’t in his own future.

Morrison was probably rationalizing that the Chinese would figure he wasn’t going to be telling anybody he’d sold them American secrets, and that once the deal was done, he was no threat. He was only partially right. The Chinese would have the software, but in order to make it work, they’d need the hardware, and that wasn’t something you could hide under a tarp. If the intelligence service of any major country suddenly had citizens run amok, killing one another, it would be cause for no small concern. If they could figure out the cause, finding the smoking gun would be relatively easy, big as the gun would have to be, and a couple of Stealth bombers could clean that clock nicely and be home in time to see the results on CNN.

The helicopter landed on the pad, the rotorwash kicking up fierce wind. Ventura slapped Morrison on the shoulder. “Stay behind me.”

They alighted from the craft, and Ventura pulled his cocked-and-locked pistol and held it down along the side of his leg. He moved quickly toward an ancient DC-3 parked a hundred yards away. As they moved, the elderly gooney bird cranked its port engine, a chuff of white exhaust smoke erupting from the engine.

Ventura smiled. He had fondness for these old planes; he had flown in them all over the world. The DC-3, sometimes called the Dakota, had been around since the mid-thirties. They were noisy, slow, and wouldn’t go all that far without refueling, but they were as dependable as sunshine in Hawaii. Ventura, whose piloting skills were emergency-level-only, had always thought that if he ever got around to buying a plane, this was the one he’d get. No bells, no whistles, but it would get you and your cargo there. It was still the best prop plane in the air, for his money.

The plane’s door opened, the little ramp lowering, and Hack Spalding stood there, grinning his gap-toothed grin. He gave Ventura the finger, which meant things were okay onboard. Ventura turned to motion Morrison up the short ramp while he watched their backs. Nobody around.

Well, good. Score another one for the round eyes ...

He wanted her to come back to her job, and the truth was, she wanted to, but that had been a big part of the problem, working for Alex, and she didn’t see how it was going to improve. He couldn’t treat her like an employee in the same way he had before they’d become lovers. It made a difference, and there were all kinds of problems that came from that. He had skipped sending her into a danger zone when she’d come up in the rotation, and while she wanted him to be concerned for her as a man for his woman, she did not want the same concern from a boss to an employee.

She’d have to do some kind of work, though, and the truth was, she’d already been offered several jobs. A couple of computer companies had approached her to head up their security services, and they’d offered a lot more money than she’d been making at Net Force. There were some nice perks, too: cars, condos, a snazzy title. And she had seriously considered taking one of these. Mostly, she could work from anywhere, though there would be some travel for secure-situation setups. But while she didn’t want to work for Alex, she also didn’t want to get so far away she couldn’t see him.

There was the possibility of a transfer. Alex had never put her resignation into the system. She’d quit, but he hadn’t told anybody higher up. She was officially on personal leave, not drawing a salary, but still considered employed. Net Force was more or less freestanding as an operation, but it was still technically part of the FBI. There were people on the other side of the fence at Quantico who would be pleased to have her working in their offices—she had heard from a couple of them, too. Thing was, while that meant she’d be in the same general vicinity as Alex, it also meant she’d be viewed as something of a traitor in Net Force. Just as the CIA and the FBI always had a de facto competition going, and there was little love lost between them, Net Force ops tended to think of regular feebs as dweebs—to be tolerated, but avoided as much as possible.

Alex probably wouldn’t like it very much if she jumped into the Bureau mainline.

Then again, it wasn’t really his choice, was it? She had to do something to earn her living, and she was already in the system—a transfer to another building would be the easiest thing all around, at least insofar as keeping her apartment, getting to work, and not having to learn new systems. And she could still see Alex for lunch or work-outs in the gym every day.

Her phone’s attention-beck came on—an odd little piece of music that came from a movie more than fifty years old, a comedy about a super-secret agent named Flint. The little tune was the same as the ring of the special phone belonging to a fictional U.S. security agency, reserved for incoming calls from the President of the United States: Dah dah dah, dah dah dah, dah DAH, dah dah dah, dah dah daaah. This little sting was courtesy of Jay Gridley, of course, who loved such esoterica, and who also loved to program personal hardware when the owner wasn’t looking.

She looked at the screen but the caller’s ID was blocked. If she’d been carrying a virgil, it wouldn’t have been.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Toni. How are you?”

Some bored god must be reading her mind and taking an interest in her life: It was Melissa Allison herself, Director of the FBI. On a Sunday, no less.

“Fine, and you?”

“Surviving. Listen, I understand you are interested in transferring from Net Force into Mainline, is that correct?”

The director, who had gotten her job by knowing where a soccer stadium’s worth of political bodies were buried, was not one to mince words.

Indeed, Toni had been considering it only seconds before, but she hadn’t made the decision yet. That’s not what the director wanted to hear. She wanted a yes or no answer. Here’s the spot, Toni, and like it or not, you’ve just been put on it. Choose.

Toni glanced at Alex, who was busy watching a young couple with two small children trying to corral the little critters. The boy, about three, was running around in circles, singing a clock song—“One o‘clock, bang, bang, bang/ Two o’clock, bang, bang, bang!” The little girl, maybe a year and half, was running away from her mother at full speed across the lawn in that lurching toddle small children had, laughing as she went. Alex was smiling at the show.

“Toni?”

Toni pulled her attention back to the phone. “Yes, ma’am, I have been considering it.”

“Wise,” the director said, and Toni knew from that one word that the woman knew about her and Alex. “I have an opening in my schedule tomorrow around one. Come and see me and we’ll discuss it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

With that, the director was gone. Toni hooked the phone back into the belt of her jeans.

Alex turned away from the children and looked at her, lifting his eyebrows in question: Who was that?

Maybe it was selfish of her, but Toni didn’t want to kill the rest of the afternoon. If she told Alex it was the director, she’d have to explain the rest, he’d want to talk about it, and she just wasn’t up to that. She’d only been back with Alex for a couple of days, it didn’t feel as secure as once it had, and if he knew she was thinking about going over to the feeb shop, she was sure he would be upset. He might not say anything, he would cover up his feelings—he was good at that, covering up his feelings—and she just wasn’t ready to go down that road.

She slipped her hand around his arm. “Nothing important,” she said. “Come on, I want to see the Smith’s new Ancient Wheels exhibit.”

He smiled at her. “Sure.”

All right. It wasn’t a lie, if maybe not strictly true, but if anything came of it, she would tell him. Why bring it up and ruin the mood now, since it might not amount to anything anyhow? A conversation with the director was all it was.

As they passed the young parents and children, Alex grinned at the little girl, who had finally gotten tired and plopped upon the neatly clipped grass, where she sat quietly cooing.

“Ever think about having children?” Alex said.

Toni was caught flatfooted. She stopped, as if she had forgotten how to walk. She stared at him. Children? With Alex? Of course she had thought about it. Dreamed about it, even. But before she could gather herself enough to say anything, he shrugged.

“Just an idle thought,” he said.